Bush and Blair Are in Trouble by John Pilgerwww.dissidentvoice.org
December 4,
2003

Shortly
before the disastrous Bush visit to Britain, Tony Blair was at the Cenotaph
on Remembrance Sunday. It was an unusual glimpse of a state killer whose
effete respectability has gone. His perfunctory nod to "the glorious dead"
came from a face bleak with guilt. As William Howard Russell of the Times
wrote of another prime minister responsible for the carnage in the Crimea,
"He carries himself like one with blood on his hands." Having shown his
studied respect to the Queen, whose prerogative allowed him to commit his
crime in Iraq, Blair hurried away. "Sneak home and pray you'll never know,"
wrote Siegfried Sassoon in 1917, "The hell where youth and laughter go."

Blair must know his
game is over. Bush's reception in Britain demonstrated that; and the CIA has
now announced that the Iraqi resistance is "broad, strong and getting
stronger", with numbers estimated at 50,000. "We could lose this situation,"
says a report to the White House. The goal now is to "plan the endgame".

Their lying has
finally become satire. Bush told David Frost that the world really had to
change its attitude about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons because they were
"very advanced". My personal favourite is Donald Rumsfeld's assessment. "The
message," he said, "is that there are known knowns - there are things that
we know that we know. There are known unknowns - that is to say, there are
things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns
... things we do not know we don't know. And each year we discover a few
more of those unknown unknowns."

An unprecedented
gathering of senior American intelligence officers, diplomats and former
Pentagon officials met in Washington the other day to say, in the words of
Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and friend of Bush's father: "Now we know
that no other president of the United States has ever lied so baldly and so
often and so demonstrably ... The presumption now has to be that he's lying
any time that he's saying anything."

And Blair and his
foreign secretary dare to suggest that the millions who have rumbled the
Bush gang are "fashionably anti-American". An instructive example of their
own mendacity was demonstrated recently by Jack Straw. On BBC Radio 4,
defending Bush and Washington's doctrine of "preventive war", Straw told the
interviewer: "Article 51 [of the United Nations Charter], to which you
referred earlier - you said it only allows for self-defense. It actually
goes more widely than that because it talks about the right of states to
take what is called 'preventive action'."

Straw's every word was
false, an invention. Article 51 does not refer to "the right of states to
take preventive action" or anything similar. Nowhere in the UN Charter is
there any such reference. Article 51 refers only to "the inherent right of
individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs" and goes on
to constrain that right further. Moreover, the UN Charter was so framed as
to outlaw any state's claimed right to preventive war.

In other words, the
Foreign Secretary fabricated a provision of the UN Charter which does not
exist, then broadcast it as fact. When Straw does speak the truth, it causes
panic. The other day, he admitted that Bush had shut him out of critical
talks in Washington with Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. Straw said he
was "not party to the talks, not a party to his [Bremer's] return visit".
The Foreign Office transcript of this leaves out that Straw had complained
that "the UK and US [are] literally the occupying powers, and we have to
meet those responsibilities". The US disregard for its principal vassal has
never been clearer.

Both are now
desperate. The Bush regime's panic is reflected in its adoption of Israeli
revenge tactics, using F-16 aircraft to drop 500lb bombs on residential
areas called "suspect zones". They are also burning crops: another Israeli
tactic. The parallels are now Palestine and Vietnam; more Americans have
died in Iraq than in the first three years of the Vietnam war.

For Bush and Blair, no
recourse to the "bravery" of "our wonderful troops" will work its populist
magic now. "My husband died in vain," read the headline in the Independent
on Sunday. Lianne Seymour, widow of the commando Ian Seymour, said: "They
misled the guys going out there. You can't just do something wrong and hope
you find a good reason for it later." The moral logic of her words is shared
by the majority of the British people, if not by Blair's diminishing court.
How decrepit the Independent's warmongering rival the Observer now appears,
with its pages of titillation and hand-wringing, having seen off a proud
liberal tradition.

"Out there", the Iraqi
dead and suffering are still unpeople, their latest death toll not worthy of
the front page. Neither is the Amnesty report that former Iraqi prisoners of
war have accused American and British troops of torturing them in custody,
blindfolding them and kicking and beating them with weapons for long
periods. Investigators from Amnesty have taken statements from 20 former
prisoners. "In one case we are talking about electric shocks being used
against a man ... If you keep beating somebody for the whole night and
somebody is bleeding and you are breaking teeth, it is more than beating,"
said Amnesty's researcher, "I think that's torture." The Americans hold more
than 4,000 prisoners - a higher figure, it is estimated, than those
incarcerated at any time by Saddam Hussein.

With Bush in London,
Baroness Symons, a Foreign Office minister, postponed a long-planned meeting
with families of British citizens held in the American concentration camp at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. She has made a habit of this. The families and their
lawyers want to ask questions about the alleged use of torture, the
deteriorating mental health of prisoners and the criminalizing of the Muslim
community in Britain. Held for two years without any due process, these
British citizens have had their rights relegated to the convenience of the
American warlord.

Blair's troubles are
only beginning. There are signs that the Shia storm is gathering in southern
Iraq, an area for which the British are responsible. A Shia underground army
is said to be forming, quietly and patiently, as it did under the shah of
Iran. If or when they rise, there will be a great deal more British blood on
the Prime Minister's hands.

For 11 November,
Remembrance Day, Hywel Williams wrote movingly in the Guardian about the
exploitation of "the usable past - something that can be packaged into
propaganda ... [by those] with careers to build and their own causes to
advance ... We are now a country draped in the weeds of war ... The
remembrance we endure now is no longer a seasonal affair. It is a continuous
festival of death as individual souls are press-ganged into the
justification of all British-American wars. To this sorrow there seems no
end."

John Pilger
is a renowned investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. His latest
documentary film, “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on
Terror”was broadcast on the ITV network in the UK, on September 22. Earlier
this year, Pilger was named the winner of the Sophie Prize,
one of the world's most distinguished
environmental and development prizes. He
was also named Media Personality of the Year, at this year's EMMA awards.
His latest book is
The New Rulers of the World (Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s
website at:
http://www.johnpilger.com